INDEX food
K
ent has long been known for its hops, orchards and cobnuts,
but increasingly it also becoming a county of chocolate-making. L’Artisan du Chocolat, which boasts Heston Blumenthal among its clients, has its atelier in Ashford, while Charbonnel et Walker, established in 1875 and holders of a Royal Warrant as suppliers of chocolate to Her Majesty the Queen, make its chocolates in Tunbridge Wells. Now, our part of Kent is also home to the considerable talents of acclaimed chocolatier Damian Allsop, who has based his recently-founded, eponymous chocolate company in Eridge, just outside Tunbridge Wells. From here, Allsop supplies his elegant chocolates to an impressive roll-call of top chefs such as Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley, Claude Bosi of Hibscus, Angela Hartnett at Murano and Tom Kerridge at The Hand and Flowers, as well as selling direct to the public through his website and stores including Liberty’s and La Fromagerie in London, and the Eridge Park Farm Shop outside Tunbridge Wells. “We’re the chocolatiers who sell to the most Michelin-starred restaurants in the country,” he says with justifi able pride. Before he became fascinated by chocolate, Allsop worked fi rst as a pastry chef, starting as a 16-year-old apprentice at the Intercontinental Group. Driven by a desire to learn more about pastry from the best in the fi eld, he worked for such legendary fi gures as Marco Pierre White at Aubergine and for Joel Rubochon in Paris. A seminal period took him to
Damian Allsop is a locally-based
chocolatier with a wholly original approach to the dark stuff. Jenny Linford meets him
Catalonia, where he worked for the Roca brothers at El Celler de Can Roca in Girona (which British TV viewers would have seen recently on the fi nals of Professional Masterchef). It was during this time that Allsop fi rst encountered El Bulli and the boundary-pushing talents of Ferran Adria. This whole experience of Catalan creativity proved deeply inspiring. “I’d been feeling very disillusioned with restaurant food. It was great to be over there, speaking the language and being able to understand what Ferran was doing and saying.” Allsop’s chocolate epiphany came while he was working as the Head Pastry Chef at Locanda Locatelli in 2001. The Tuscan-based chocolatier Amedei fl ew him out to Tuscany to show him what they were doing. “They really taught me how to taste chocolate properly, what chocolate was about. It was a revelation – in terms of realising the work that went into creating great chocolate and especially of the fl avour.
I
came back to Locatelli’s very excited by what I’d tasted, and particularly by this incredible Chuao [a type of chocolate]. The boys back at Locatelli’s wanted to know what I’d been doing, so I took the chocolate and made a mousse with it. They thought it was lovely, but I knew I’d taken something that was incredible and put my paws on it and texturised it and lost its original fl avour in the process – that’s got to be wrong.” The quest to capture
chocolate’s fl avour faithfully has been a hallmark of Allsop’s
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work with chocolate ever since. “I worked on a mousse, then an ice cream, a froth, a foam , a jelly and eventually, after eight years, I worked out the ganache.” Allsop’s trademark chocolate
creation is a ganache made with water. The ganache is the soft fi lling used in truffl es, traditionally made from chocolate mixed with cream, often enriched with butter. Radically, Allsop departs from this tradition, using instead an emulsion of chocolate and water, which he feels is a better way of expressing the chocolate’s true fl avour. “Creating a water ganache is technically challenging,” he says, “that’s why nobody else does it!”
One of the reasons why
it’s challenging concerns shelf life. “Shelf life pertains to water activity,” Allsop explains, “if your liquid side is out of balance, the chocolate will go off in just two or three days.” Creating a successful water ganache took Allsop years of obsessive experimentation. “I remember when Anna, my wife, and I were setting up our own chocolate business but the ganache recipe wasn’t quite there, I’d have 24 different pots on the balcony of our fl at all containing tiny amounts of different combinations of different products. I’d wake her up at 1am in the morning because her palate was fresh and get her to taste them and see if she noticed any weird things going on,” explains Allsop, laughing. Allsop’s signature use of
water rather than cream in his chocolate ganache is one of the reasons why he’s now based in Kent. “Lord Abergavenny has these Sham Farm units, and he also has natural spring water on the land, which is what we use in the ganache – so it all clicked in. He’s opened a really goof farm shop on the estate, too, which is all about quality – and I’m not just saying that because they stock our chocolates!” And quality food is clearly as important to Allsop in his personal life as it is in his professional one. “We moved here from Marlow a year and a half ago, and now live in Ticehurst. We’re in a very rural spot and there’s a strong local food culture – something that’s really important to us. I can buy my meat from one of the farmshops on our doorstop and there’s a fruit fi eld next door to our house, so I don’t have to set foot into a supermarket if I don’t want to. It’s a lovely part of the world and a good catchment area for our sort of clients, too.”
Those clients are clearly
receptive to the playful quality that embues much of Allsop’s chocolates: among his offerings are creative delights including his Clouds range – fl avoured dried foams encased in chocolate in fl avours such as Lime or Banana and Passion Fruit. He is a chocolatier who is always experimenting. Among Allsop’s latest creations is a collection of water ganaches of which he is particularly proud: Pure. “It’s my favourite,” he admits. “It’s all about the chocolate – there are no fl avours added. This collection is like cherry-picking the best fi ne wines in the world and putting them into miniatures – it represents the best chocolates in the world.”
www.damianallsop.com 23
The INDEX magazine February 2012
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